@inproceedings{stap-etal-2023-viewing,
title = "Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lens",
author = "Stap, David and
Niculae, Vlad and
Monz, Christof",
editor = "Bouamor, Houda and
Pino, Juan and
Bali, Kalika",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.998",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.998",
pages = "14973--14987",
abstract = "We argue that translation quality alone is not a sufficient metric for measuring knowledge transfer in multilingual neural machine translation. To support this claim, we introduce Representational Transfer Potential (RTP), which measures representational similarities between languages. We show that RTP can measure both positive and negative transfer (interference), and find that RTP is strongly correlated with changes in translation quality, indicating that transfer \textit{does} occur. Furthermore, we investigate data and language characteristics that are relevant for transfer, and find that multi-parallel overlap is an important yet under-explored feature. Based on this, we develop a novel training scheme, which uses an auxiliary similarity loss that encourages representations to be more invariant across languages by taking advantage of multi-parallel data. We show that our method yields increased translation quality for low- and mid-resource languages across multiple data and model setups.",
}
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<abstract>We argue that translation quality alone is not a sufficient metric for measuring knowledge transfer in multilingual neural machine translation. To support this claim, we introduce Representational Transfer Potential (RTP), which measures representational similarities between languages. We show that RTP can measure both positive and negative transfer (interference), and find that RTP is strongly correlated with changes in translation quality, indicating that transfer does occur. Furthermore, we investigate data and language characteristics that are relevant for transfer, and find that multi-parallel overlap is an important yet under-explored feature. Based on this, we develop a novel training scheme, which uses an auxiliary similarity loss that encourages representations to be more invariant across languages by taking advantage of multi-parallel data. We show that our method yields increased translation quality for low- and mid-resource languages across multiple data and model setups.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lens
%A Stap, David
%A Niculae, Vlad
%A Monz, Christof
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y Pino, Juan
%Y Bali, Kalika
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Singapore
%F stap-etal-2023-viewing
%X We argue that translation quality alone is not a sufficient metric for measuring knowledge transfer in multilingual neural machine translation. To support this claim, we introduce Representational Transfer Potential (RTP), which measures representational similarities between languages. We show that RTP can measure both positive and negative transfer (interference), and find that RTP is strongly correlated with changes in translation quality, indicating that transfer does occur. Furthermore, we investigate data and language characteristics that are relevant for transfer, and find that multi-parallel overlap is an important yet under-explored feature. Based on this, we develop a novel training scheme, which uses an auxiliary similarity loss that encourages representations to be more invariant across languages by taking advantage of multi-parallel data. We show that our method yields increased translation quality for low- and mid-resource languages across multiple data and model setups.
%R 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.998
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.998
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.998
%P 14973-14987
Markdown (Informal)
[Viewing Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation Through a Representational Lens](https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.998) (Stap et al., Findings 2023)
ACL